R&S Records

R&S Records is an independent record label. Founded in 1984 in Ghent, Belgium,

R&S represents the initials of Renaat Vandepapeliere and Sabine Maes, the couple that created the label. The label was first named as Milos Music Belgium but just one record was released on the label. Vandepapeliere went from DJaying to developing the label in response to his personal irritation with the Belgian music scene while getting inspired by Belgian New Beat in the late 1980s: "I worked in a record shop, but as a DJ I was getting very frustrated with the Belgian scene. The clubs were so commercial and American music just wasn't accepted. The guys that were importing records here, they went straight into the studio and created a bad cover of it. I didn't like that. I said 'Respect the artist. License it in, and let's have the original track'. That's where the idea to start the label started, and it was New Beat that gave me the chance."

R&S Records has had several subsidiaries, most notably Apollo Records (Belgium), which was reactivated in 2009.

Joey Beltram

Joey Beltram (born September 2, 1971 in Queens, New York City, United States) is an American DJ and record producer, best known for the pioneering recordings "Energy Flash" and "Mentasm".

Rave recordings

Mentasm, co-produced with Mundo Muzique and released under the artist name Second Phase in 1991, became iconic within rave culture, as it was the track that gave birth to the "mentasm riff" (also known as the "Hoover sound"): a churning, dirgelike synth pattern that wormed into techno's communal genome and has since been mutated and reused in literally thousands of records. Beltram and the "mentasm riff" are strongly associated with drum and bass, the Belgian techno scene, and the R&S record label, as well as hardcore/hard house in their various permutations since 1994. Beltram was referenced as a pioneer in the late 1990s house music scene by Daft Punk, in their song "Teachers" off their 1997 debut album, Homework and author, Simon Reynolds, credited Beltram with having "revolutionized techno twice before the age of 21," when describing both "Energy Flash" and "Mentasm" in his book Generation Ecstasy.